One reason for uncertainty is that the state AFL and
CIO organizations have proved more reluctant than the parent AFL and CIO
to blend forces. Primarily, rivals for top jobs at the state level have
been unable to resolve personality conflicts.

Meany points out a two-year period left for voluntary
mergers of state and local AFL and CIO outfits. After that, he said,
"if the boys are still stalling and maneuvering around,"
"the parent organization will step in and dictate the
mergers."

Only 19 of the states with relatively few AFL and CIO
members have merged so far. These states have, together, less than one
half million of the AFL-CIO's members. They are Missouri, Oregon,
Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arizona, Montana,
Vermont, Colorado, Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Nebraska, New
Mexico, Alabama, and Maine.

It has dabbled cautiously in organizing in the
textile, tobacco, and chemical industries. It has made some progress in the direction of
cleaning corruption out of the labor movement, but nothing really
substantial has been accomplished.

It has spent a busy year politically, mostly on the side
of the Democrats in the fall elections. But although claiming "a
large measure" of credit for election "a liberal
Congress," the AFL-CIO also supported President Eisenhower's
Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson.

This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost